Customer service representatives are often responsible for a wide variety of tasks. In addition to being proficient in accomplishing particular tasks like updating addresses or other status changes, providing new or updated quotes, responding to billing inquiries, cancelling and renewing services, and entering data related to the customer, the customer service representative is expected to be more than cordial, pleasant, engaging and generally charming.
To support customer service representatives, each has a workstation. The customer service representative relies on their workstation to provide them with information quickly in order to maintain conversational flow with the customer. Despite tremendous computing power and the latest technology, delays are inevitably introduced by the support technology. Additional delays are also created by the customer service representative, whether it be the customer service representative's natural speech cadence, thought process, deliberation over a selection, or simple consideration of what to say or type next. As a result, everyone is familiar with the unproductive long uncomfortable pause.
When dealing with a customer who has researched products and services in advance, commonly by using the Internet, further difficulty arises in that the customer might not understand or clearly communicate the results of her research to the customer service representative. Often, a call to the company results from the customer's dissatisfaction and frustration with the company's Web site.
Under such circumstances, customer service representatives are expected to still mine the customer for opportunities to make new and additional sales of products and services, often referred to as “upselling.” This is a difficult task. However, upselling is critical to expanding revenue with a targeted group, which is predisposed to using the company for goods and services (e.g., existing customers or potential customers who have already reached out to the company).
It is understandable that with all that a customer service representative is expected to juggle, that presenting a warm, confident, informed face to the customer is challenging. Yet, this is exactly what is expected. Thus, a need exists to provide support to the customer service representatives to allow them to represent the company as well as possible.
In response to these challenges, several approaches have been developed to improve customer service. U.S. Pat. No. 8,588,395, issued on Nov. 19, 2013, collects data from a plurality of calls to generate reports. Upon review of the reports, alerts are generated to identify poorly performing units. Other attempts at improvement look to remove, or at least minimize, the role of the customer service representative herself. For example, U.S. PG Pub. No. 2012/0076283, published on Mar. 29, 2012, creates a smart chat room in which customers can be directed to an appropriate Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) or particular display that may assist the customer without interaction with a customer service representative. None of these teachings smartly assist the customer service representative with the tasks of upselling.
Referral of services or additional information from the customer service representative to the customer is profitable and desirable. Thus, there is an unmet need to provide companies, such as insurance companies, the ability to enhance interactions between their customers and customer service representatives to facilitate providing useful recommendations to the customers that lead to additional sales.